Friday, May 29, 2015

Buttressing the Race through Inquisitorial Testing

Among the many ways in which the Conservatives have not sought to break with the previous Labour administration is, of course, government snoopery; and a Labour borough council has zealously continued that proud bipartisan tradition. Survivors of the Blair régime will recall his reverence's decree that extremists must be detected in the womb; Waltham Forest council has done its bit for total policing by testing nine-year-old schoolchildren for suspected flaws in their Britishness. The survey was meant to be anonymous, but those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, so pupils were asked to identify themselves; and nearly a quarter of the borough's population is Muslim, so parents were not consulted in case tribal patriarchs terrified all the offspring in their compounds into non-compliance or, worse yet, fifth-column fakery. Since it appears to be concerned mainly with hunting down divergence and fomenting paranoia, the surveillance programme goes under the acronym BRIT - Building Resilience through Integration and Trust - which must be the most charming use of Newspeak since the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith decided to call his own pet thick-tank the Centre for Social Justice.